The present invention relates to a semiconductor device simulator, a simulation method and a non-transitory computer readable medium, and it is suitably applicable to a simulator, a simulation method and a non-transitory computer readable medium for a semiconductor device having an analog front-end circuit, for example.
Sensors are increasingly employed in various equipments such as consumer products, industrial products and medical products because of improvement of usability, enlargement of ecosystem, penetration of health care, enhancement of security and the like. Factors behind this trend include the improved usability of a sensor device and the low voltage and the low power of an analog circuit which is essential to implement a sensor to allow system downsizing and cost reduction. There are various types of sensors including a temperature sensor, an infrared sensor, a photosensor and a shock sensor, and a circuit for processing a sensor signal is formed and characteristics are set in accordance with their principle of operation.
In such equipment, a control device such as a microcomputer performs control processing in accordance with a measurement result of a sensor. Because a measurement signal that is output from a sensor cannot be processed by a control device such as a microcomputer, analog front-end (AFE) processing such as amplification to a specified level and removal of noise is performed by an analog front-end circuit before input to the microcomputer. The analog front-end processing requires design according to the principle of operation and the characteristics of a sensor and further requires design know-how specific to analog, and therefore a dedicated AFE circuit or a dedicated IC has been developed for a specific sensor by narrowing down the principle of operation and the characteristics of a sensor to be processed.
As a design support tool for designing such an AFE circuit, a circuit simulator (which is also referred to simply as “simulator”) has been used. Widely used circuit simulators are a stand alone simulator that executes simulation on a single computer and a web server simulator (which is referred to as “web simulator”) that executes simulation on an online web server. For example, “WEBENCH Designer” of Texas Instruments is known as a web simulator according to related art (Internet <URL:http://www.tij.co.jp/tihome/jp/docs/homepage.tsp>, [Searched on Mar. 13, 2013]).
The “WEBENCH Designer” is a web simulator for a semiconductor device that includes an AFE circuit for a sensor. In the “WEBENCH Designer”, simulation is performed after a user selects a sensor to be connected to an AFE circuit and then sets a physical quantity to be detected by the sensor. In the “WEBENCH Designer”, the user can adjust the gain of an amplifier in the AFE circuit by using a simulation result as a reference.
Note that United States Patent Publication No. 2001/0056446 is also known as a web simulator for a semiconductor device according to related art.